Love's a Four Letter Word
by ScarletAngel68
Summary: Fifty ways that Beast Boy and Raven did, didn't, almost, will, will not, already did, never, practically, and sort of fall in love. [A series of fifty unrelated oneshots, each dubiously based on a love quote.]
1. tuesday

Hello. There are meant to be fifty of these, written for the LiveJournal community **50lovequotes**. Each story will be based around a quote about love - what it says on the tin. Each will be about Beast Boy and Raven in some way. They might be long, they might be short, they might be related to one another, though probably not, and I can't promise prompt updates. But I hope that you'll find some enjoyment in reading these, whenever they may come out and whenever you may read them. And, as always, I shamelessly beg for you to let me know what you think.

1._ Sometimes someone can say something so small and meaningful that it manages to fit right into that empty space in your heart._

**tuesday**

"Hi," he said one day, and sat at her lunch table with his brown paper bag full of tofu. That was it. That was how it started.

People used to whisper things about her. (_Who's that strange, quiet girl with the dark eyes?_) She used to glare, and snap, and fight back. (_Oh, the bitch?_) She learned better. (_They say her name is Raven. I think._) The answers changed as she learned how to fade. (_Who? Where? Oh, that's just Raven._) Keeping caustic comments to herself, disappearing in the folds of her comfortable blue sweatshirt, shrouding intensely violet eyes under a pulled-up hood. (_Um. She's..._) Until, finally, no one asked anymore.

She eradicates her every sense of self, considers every spare emotion a weakness she can't afford. She's just a body, indistinguishable from the colorless walls of the school around them. Only the janitor knows her, but that's because he tried to sweep her shoes away with the rest of the trash at the end of lunch one day - she was still wearing them at the time. Her shoes have broom-scuffs on them still, and she thinks of them as trophies, proof of what she had thought was her impenetrable invisibility.

So how did _he_ see her? Why did this bafflingly loud, joking, tofu-consuming creature decide that he would waste his time on the unseen girl at the back of the lunchroom?

He'd said "Hi," and sat, and she resented it a little. A lot, when he came back the next day, and more when he returned the day after _that_. Invisibility is hard work, and his attention is a blatant insult to her craft.

Every day for weeks, she wraps her hands tightly around the warm thermos of tea and lets his endless river of words wash over her.

It's irritating and eye roll-inducing.

It's the first time in forever that she's felt something other than just hollow.

She starts to talk again, a little.

His words, his smiles, his wild gesticulations and ridiculous declarations seem to fill her up to the brim with...she doesn't know what. He starts walking her home. She doesn't stop him.

On a Tuesday afternoon, exactly four weeks after he first sat with her – not that she kept track, made tallies in the margins of her small black book (amid the poems, the emotions she'll tell you she got rid of long ago, though the pages are dated as recently as yesterday), waiting for the day he'd get bored of her – he's going out of his way to crunch the brown leaves along the sidewalk, still talking and talking. Quietly, she breathes out, watching her breath escape into the cool air and pretending she's not listening.

He laughs at his own joke and cocks his head at the sarcasm in her response. When he leans forward with a grin and vows he'll make her smile somehow, the whatever-it-is that fills her quivers at the edge and threatens to overflow.


	2. headfirst

2._ Never say sorry for what you meant to do._

**headfirst**

He stumbles through life because that is just the way he does things, and with stumbling inevitably comes collisions.

He's gotten pretty used to the word "Sorry."

"Sorry," he said as Mom cried, rocking him over and over because there was no cure.

"Sorry," he said when he knocked over a sandcastle at the beach. Beast Boy glanced across the towels and sunbathers, at Cyborg and Robin, diving indiscriminately across the sand for the football they were tossing, not a crying toddler in sight. He'd only been walking to the bathroom. He made another sandcastle to make up for it, but it wasn't as good, so he said "Sorry" for that, too, and bought the kid an ice cream.

He falls off the bed a lot, face mashed into the carpet. Usually he's too tired to get up again. "Sorry," he'll mutter to the floor, just in case it's upset at the close proximity.

"Sorry," he says as he collides into Raven in the hall. He grabs her shoulder to steady her balance, but only ends up throwing himself off and has to catch her other shoulder, and then he's okay but a little closer to her than is socially acceptable, and since he's sure she'll mind a lot more than the floor will, he says, "Sorry."

She says something about it being fine, whatever, and that draws his attention to her mouth, which is sort of right there, and he feels a little unbalanced again and doesn't so much kiss her as…bump into her lips.

Raven doesn't seem quite as bothered as the floor was, after all.

Many moments later, he gasps, "Sorry," pulling away, breath hitching. "Forgot about breathing."

"As long as it doesn't happen again," Raven frowns, so he dutifully sucks in some air as she sinks a hand into his hair and reels him in again.


End file.
